More than six weeks of struggle by the town’s Kurdish defenders to hold off the assaults of Islamic State, relayed to the world by camera teams camped across the frontier in Turkey, has spurred outside powers into action.
For the Kurds and their fighting forces, the conflict has a wider significance. It marks a rare moment in Kurdish history when Kurds have come together across the international borders that divide them to join a pan-Kurdish fight against a common enemy.
And, this time, the Kurds have widespread international support, both public and political, albeit grudging in the case of Turkey.
The true significance of Kobane in the Kurdish narrative will depend, of course, on the outcome of the battle. The hopes of Kurds everywhere are now riding on the ability of the Peshmerga to help turn the tide against the ISIS jihadists.
It is likely, however, that Kobane 2014 will come to figure in the Kurdish annals, alongside other names and dates that mark the triumphs, and more often the tragedies, of the nation’s modern history: the Mahabad Republic of 1946, the uprising that began at Ranya in 1991, the 1988 slaughter at Halabja that finally exposed the iniquity of Saddam Hussein’s regime, even to those who had preferred to look the other way.
With world attention focused on Kurdistan and the Kurds as never before, the Peshmerga have transmogrified in the international public consciousness from a disparate band of colourful mountain irregulars into a modern fighting force.
For those who watched the region closely, that was already apparent in 2003, when Peshmerga forces held the line in the north against Saddam’s forces after Turkey failed to join the U.S.-led war against the Iraqi dictator.
Since then, they have quietly safeguarded the border that Kurdistan shared initially with dysfunctional, Baghdad-controlled Iraq and now share with ISIS. The Peshmerga helped spare the region the turmoil and violence that afflicted the rest of the country.
In recent months and weeks, however, it seems that the word Peshmerga is on everyone’s lips as the byword for a dedicated, loyal and unfanatical fighting force that might be capable, with help, of pushing back ISIS’s Islamist tide.
With Kobane, the role of the Peshmerga has been given particular prominence. Now, they are not only protecting their own territory but are taking the fight across the border to Syria to assist fellow Kurds.
For the United States and its allies, Kurdish fighters – whether Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) Peshmerga or the more ideological militia of Rojava’s [Syrian Kurdistan] People’s Protection Units – have emerged as the only reliable “boots on the ground” to confront the jihadists.
The modern Peshmerga are the inheritors of a Kurdish fighting tradition that goes back centuries. The tragedy of the Kurdish nation, however, is that Kurds have invariably fought each other in the service of foreign masters rather than in pursuit of their own national cause.
From the late 19th century through to the post-World War I era, legendary figures such as Simko Shikak and Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji emerged to pursue the Kurdish cause across what were to become the borders of the region’s modern states.
That brought Kurdish fighters into conflict both with local powers that sought to suppress them, and with colonial powers – Britain and Russia, in particular – that sought to manipulate the Kurds for their own benefit.
In these struggles, the hardy Kurdish mountain men were more often than not fighting in a tribal or sectarian cause than on behalf of the Kurdish nation.
The Peshmerga only emerged as a truly national force with the foundation of the Republic of Mahabad in January 1946. It was less than a year until Iran, with nominal sovereignty over the Kurdish territory, crushed the national experiment and later hanged its founder, Qazi Mohammad, for treason.
During its brief months of existence, the Republic, founded under Soviet tutelage at the end of World War II, relied on an army drawn from the Kurds of Iraq and led by Mustafa Barzani.
Barzani’s experiences in Mahabad were to form the background to a life of struggle that involved a series of revolts against successive governments in Baghdad in pursuit of Kurdish rights.
The last collapsed in 1975 when the Iranians, the Americans, and the Israelis, who had supported him as a proxy against Baghdad’s Baathist regime, withdrew their support.
Four decades on, Barzani’s son, Massoud, is President of the KRG and commander-in-chief of its formally recognised armed forces, the Peshmerga, an organization now regarded by allies such as the US as an army in its own right.
Now it is fighting to protect Kurdish land in Syria, the first “foreign” force dispatched on the ground to the defence of Kobane.
William Eagleton, an American diplomat and historian of Mahabad, wrote in 1963: “It can be predicted for the future, as we know from the past, that the Kurds in their distant mountains and separated valleys will at times be forgotten or ignored.
“Then, when moved by resolve or temerity, some of the characters of 1946, and others, younger and perhaps unknown in Mahabad, will be heard of once again.”
As in Mahabad, so in Kobane. The same spirit of resolve and temerity appears to have moved all Kurds to support the struggle. And their Peshmerga are present to see that the battle enters Kurdish history.
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